Astrobiologist Lucas Mix on What it Means to be Human
“To be human is to be in relationship.”
Lucas Mix is an Evolutionary Biologist and ordained Priest who has worked with scientists at NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. He is also a good friend of mine. We met when he was a Fellow in Astrobiology at the Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI). I was invited to an Astrobiology workshop that Lucas was leading at the CTI back in 2016, and we have remained connected ever since. We share a love for all things faith and science, writing and even the arts—he writes poetry and has written some songs as well.
When I released my song “To Become Human” last year, I decided to celebrate this special moment with a virtual launch party with friends and family. The vision behind the launch party was to tell the story behind my song, perform my song live, and incorporate a lecture or sermon that would help contextualize my song. Lucas was one of the first persons that came to mind given his connection to the CTI where I shared the first iteration of my song, but also because of his extensive experience unpacking the question of what it means to be human in various interdisciplinary contexts. I invited him to give a short talk on the biology and theology of what it means to be human, drawing on aspects from my song, and he graciously agreed. A short excerpt from the talk is below, followed by a video recording of the talk he gave at the launch party for my song. A full transcript can be accessed on his blog An Ecclesiastical Peculiar.
“What does it mean to be human?
It’s an interesting question,
one that biology and theology can both weigh in on,
but, I think, one that neither can answer by itself.
And this is fitting, because, as the song says,
To be human is to “be part of a larger species, part of a larger world.”
To be human is to be in relationship.
As a biologist, I would say that there is something special about life,
that comes from participating in a larger system.
Evolution and metabolism are both relational processes,
evolution because it involves interaction with others –
cooperation and competition, inheritance, and variation –
metabolism because it involves using chemical resources
and reordering your surroundings.
As a theologian, I would also say that there is something special about life.
In Christianity, it means participating in the life of God.
Human life, in the image and likeness of God,
involves reason and will, participating in divine order,
the Logos of the Cosmos, participating in Christ.
More viscerally, respiration,
our continual process of breathing out and breathing in,
means that we are always sharing life and breath with our neighbors.”
